Wednesday, 27 February 2013

The dreaded day has come! Video views on the 'cutbacks' channel on Youtube have been slashed back to October 2011 figures, from 373,000 to 158,000. How could this happen? Well, channel video views now only counts views from what Youtube term 'active' videos. Naively, in the past, I used to delete videos from the channel, to 'freshen it up'. How wrong was I!Here's the rather formal message from our friends in Youtube...

The view count shown on your YouTube channel now includes only views from public videos. To include views from private or unlisted videos, change them to 'public'. YouTube Analytics channel view counts will continue to include views from all videos that were public at the time the view occurred even if the videos are now private, unlisted, or deleted.It still feels like a 'loss' of 215,000 honestly earned video views. Wow, these internet video platforms sure have a way of demoralising content producers and creatives... Don't they know how paranoid, tired and vulnerable we are? I don't take these issues to heart...

Saturday, 16 February 2013

Jazis! The IPSOS MRBI poll was no flash in the pan! Now a Millward Brown poll puts Fianna Fail in the lead, two points ahead of Fine Gael! No Prom note bounce for the government - we still hate their guts. Where will this end? Ming for Taoiseach!

Clare Daly, cleared of all drink driving charges, now wonders why the gardai handcuffed her, locked her in a cell, tweeted their friends and called all the newspapers... 'standard procedure' they assured her... Here are Ming, Clare and Vincent...

Enda Kenny's Irish government can do no wrong - forget no government apologies for the Magdalene Laundry scandal, forget hospital closures, patients on trolleys, the closure of rural garda stations, Fine Gael cronyism within the cabinet and a raft of new taxes on all citizens (but especially on the poor). Enda's riding high (on our backs). He's secured his deal on Anglo promissiory notes and is now in Brussels, fixing the European Union's budget!Next stop, a General Election - time to ditch those pesky Labour parasites!

Tony Donoghue, still reeling from his Sundance win, has requested that I change the name on my first 'Folk Furniture' video, where battered wardrobes and dressers discuss dryrot, woodworm and big screws. Tony says that people, searching for his film on Youtube, were finding mine. Apologies! These are the perils of internet Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)! Though my cutbacks video views seem to be relatively flat, the cutbacks series remains relatively prominent on search engines. No Problem - I've renamed my video 'The Sequel - Folk Furniture'.

Tony's request to makes changes to my video also points to the need for some form of 'video update' feature on Youtube. In this instance, there was no way to change the title on the video itself, except by using the rather unsatisfactory annotations-label function (which is not designed for retitling videos). The Youtube Video Editor can do text but it won't blur off an area of the screen to obcure the original titles.We need occasional access to a Youtube video update feature.Here's the second Folk Furniture instalment, in which a dresser shows her drawers... Barry O' Donoghue says that they seem to be 'floating in space' - my mistake (messing with the greenscreen)...

Saturday, 2 February 2013

As 250,000 Twitter accounts are hacked by 'China-based hackers', Google chairman Eric Schmidt calls China "an internet menace", "the world's most active and enthusiastic filterer of information" and "the most sophisticated and prolific" hacker of foreign companies!The New York Times quotes Schmidt's new book 'The New Digital Age' - "The disparity between American and Chinese firms and their tactics will put both the government and the companies of the United States as a distinct disadvantage." Never mind the United States! The entire world will lose this cyberwar against the massed Chinese hackers if things stay as they are! Who's teaching the next generation of western internet hackers? Where are our government-sponsored hacker training programmes?

China dismisses such hacking accusations as "groundless" and "totally irresponsible".Meanwhile, Rinky revels in The Twitter hack! Every cloud has a silver lining!